Life and Annuity Distributor Starts Agent Rights Petition
Brett Blake says some agents feel as if they're being held hostage by their IMOs and FMOs.
The head of a life and annuity field marketing organization wants to make it easier for agents to switch from one distributor to another.
Brett Blake, the chief executive officer of Annuity.com, has started a Change.org petition that calls for FMOs and other distributors, such as independent marketing organizations, to provide agents with contract release forms upon request.
The petition also calls for insurers to stop letting IMOs require agents to get releases before the submitting applications to the insurers through different distributors.
Some agents feel as if distributors hold them hostage, Blake said.
It’s not clear how many distributors try to lock agents in, Blake said in an email. He said the performance of the petition will show how common the problem is.
The petition received 26 signatures within a day of being posted but will need thousands of signatures to have much weight, Blake said. He noted that the Change.org website generates signature goal indicators that are unrelated to the campaign’s own goals.
What it means: Maintaining good relationships between client-level financial professionals and distributors is not always easy.
The agent lock-in issue: Distributors may have valid reasons to lock agents in when they have paid for an agent’s training or agents want to switch distributors frequently, but agents should be able to appeal unfair lock-ins, Blake said.
“One agent was left hanging with a client’s check for weeks, unable to get a response from his FMO to write a contract,” Blake says on the petition website.
Annuity.com provides a pre-release form when agents affiliate with it, and many other distributors are quick to release agents who want to leave, Blake said.
Distributor lock-in problems have cropped up frequently over the past 30 years but seem to be occurring more often now, according to Bill Broich, the founder and previous owner of Annuity.com.
“There are also some terrific FMOs who allow movement in an efficient manner,” Broich said in an email. “The ones that don’t are usually medium or small FMOs, and, more often than not, they are angry at an agent trying to better themselves.”
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